Athenaeum, which is described as a "libre replacement for Steam" by the developer just recently had a big new release out.

Okay, so what exactly does it do? It's basically a front-end for Flathub and so all games are installed using Flatpak. Quite a handy application though, a little nicer than using the command-line or browsing the Flathub website directly. It may eventually grow into something bigger but for now it seems to do the basic job of managing FOSS games quite nicely.

Click to enlarge.

The 1.0 release comes with some new bits and pieces:

A completely new User Interface with multiple different screens.

An expanded search functionality with filtering by tags.

A recommendation engine to provide recommendations on startup based on games you have installed, and recommendations for games you are viewing in the browse area.

Preliminary work on multi OS support.

Install popup modal to inform you of game size before proceeding.

I'll be following this project along a little more closely now, will be fun to see it continue to grow.

You can see more about it on GitLab and install the application itself from Flathub.

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. See more from me

I saw the phrases "FOSS game launcher" and "replacement for Steam" and I thought I was going to read about how Athenaeum was a FOSS Steam client replacement! It's not, I can see now. But I'm a bit unclear about what it is or is meant to be.

Is it meant to be a game management project but strictly for FOSS titles, is that right? And currently it's limited to FOSS titles only found in Flathub's Games section?

I'm not going to sign up to GitLabs just for this, so I hope someone else will point this out to the dev. Athenaeum might be called a "Steam-like game launcher for FOSS games," or "A FOSS-only game management tool" or any plethora of other things which would be equally descriptive and really spotlight its role promoting FOSS games.

But it's not a "replacement for Steam." And it does itself a disservice advertising itself as such. There isn't a FOSS-specific game launcher---that I'm aware of, at least---and Athenaeum could do so much to promote those projects. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say Athenaeum is going to do so much to promote the world of FOSS games, but it's got to start by not calling itself "a replacement for Steam."

Purple Library GuyHuh. Potentially interesting I guess, but my "replacement for Steam" for FOSS games is called "My distro's repository" and the "software manager" GUI thing.

I don't know software managers to put software into own categories or such. (I think there are some to at least site a screenshot?)

I use Mint. Its software manager does categories, at least in terms of "Games" vs "Office" vs "Graphics" or suchlike. It doesn't have subcategories of games, but there aren't enough FOSS games for me to really need to worry about that. Well, not enough working FOSS games that I want to install for me to need to worry about that, anyway . . .

While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on Patreon, Liberapay or Paypal. We have no adverts, no paywalls, no timed exclusive articles. Just good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!